Dudley Felker Randall was born in Washington, D.C., on January 14, 1914. He showed an early interest in poetry; when he was four he composed lyrics for "Maryland, My Maryland," a song played at a band concert in Townson, a suburb of Baltimore"(Layman and Clark 266). "Dudley Randall was a writer, librarian, and a publisher; Dudley Randall has made significant contributions to twentieth-century American literature" (Layman and Clark 266). Dudley Randall's Ballad of Birmingham gives a poetic account of the bombing of a Birmingham church in 1963. The author shows how the 1960s were like. "Randall establishes racial progress as a kind of blossoming, as he recounts the incident based on a historical event of the bombing in 1963 of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s church by white terrorists" (Layman and Clark 267). Irony plays a big part in the ballad showing the church as a war zone and the Freedom March as the safer place. In the poem, Randall uses two very important, but different locations to stress the two meaning of the poem. Why did Randall choose to use the church and the Freedom March? Randall also uses a sense of irony by having the child wanting to go to the Freedom March while the mother refuses to let her go.
             In the poem, the child is acting like an adult wanting to go to the Freedom March. The mother wants the child to be in a safe place. This is the reason why the mother suggests to the child to go to church and sing in the choir, figuring that the church would never be a place of danger. In fact, the church became a place of destruction and violence just like the Freedom March. "According to the Guardsman Online, on an autumn morning in 1963, 14-year-old Carolyn McKinstry saw Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley, and Addie Mae Collins playfully laughing while donning choir robes in the basement of the 16th Baptist church." The mother felt the child would either get hurt or maybe even killed at the march, but in realit...